UN Quietly Scrubs Embattled Graph from Climate Report

By Marc Sheppard

In yesterday’s article, UN Climate Reports: They Lie, we discussed the problems associated with a chart that appeared in the UN’s most recent climate report. One such issue was that the graphic, which claimed to establish a “correlation between temperature and CO2,” used a temperature plot immediately recognizable as the infamously debunked “Hockey Stick Graph.”

And the agency’s timing couldn’t have been worse. For starters, the immediate recognition of MBH98 on page 5 of the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Climate Change Science Compendium 2009 sparked email exchanges which lead to this piece at Climate Audit, which, in turn, lead to immediate on-line outrage among many who write on the subject. Then, only days later, CA’s Steve Mcintyre received and analyzed data he had been denied for years, which allowed him to debunk the data alarmists had been using to defend the notion that 20^th century warming was unprecedented for the millennium.

But as now reported by Anthony Watts at Watt’s Up With That, UNEP has replaced the embattled graphic, which was taken not from peer-reviewed journals but rather a 2005 Wikimedia posting by an unknown Norwegian research biologist, with a more traditional (and carbon free) chart from GISS. Curiously, no explanation was given for the switch. UNEP simply treated Hanno 2009 in the same deceitful manner they treat the MWP – as though it were never really there.

Here’s the original page 5, as I first saw it on September 24^th:

And here’s what you’ll find if you pull the PDF today. Notice the new graph in the upper right hand corner.

Not surprisingly, even in choosing the replacement graph -- the UN was less than honest. After all, while the original depicted the entire millennium, its replacement conveniently begins at 1880, immediately AFTER the post-Little Ice Age warming began. This slice, in conjunction with the previous graph of post-1960 atmospheric CO2 levels on the same page, is no-doubt intended to give readers the false impression that modern warming is exceptional and indisputably linked to rising CO2.

Furthermore -- as Anthony correctly points out -- the reconstruction of Global Annual Mean Surface Air Temperature Change used was Hansen et al. (2006). But that chart has been superseded on the GISS data site by the one below, dated January 2009.